Local Bites Podcast - Local Futures

Rebuilding Healthy Communities: The Growing Ecovillage Movement

Seeds of Resilience, Seeds of Sovereignty

Why Local Ownership Matters

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Produced by Local Futures, the Local Bites Podcast features inspiring interviews with leaders of localization efforts from around the world. Listen to individual episodes below. You can also subscribe to the podcast through PodBean or iTunes. Or, to receive notice of new podcasts, sign up to receive Local Futures’ email updates.

Societies and communities everywhere are under threat from an increasingly corporatized global economy that is shifting power and resources from the many to the few and separating us from one another and from nature. Around the world, however, an increasing number of people are actively looking to re-establish the bonds of interdependence and recreate community living in tune with nature.

In this episode, Local Futures’ Anja Lyngbaek interviews Kosha Joubert, the Chief Executive Officer of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), about the rapidly growing ecovillage movement, which sees the ecovillage concept being adopted and adapted by a multitude of people and diverse cultures across the globe. Kosha speaks of the multiple social and environmental benefits of ecovillages, including the mitigation of climate change. We hear of a host of inspiring initiatives, including rural villages in China choosing to transition to ecovillages, Senegal’s national ecovillage strategy, tried and tested ecovillages in Asia and emerging initiatives in Palestine and Gambia that offer youth an alternative path to the migration to big cities.

Humanity has lost nearly three-quarters of its agricultural biodiversity in the last century. Now, in the face of an increasingly volatile climate, conserving the remaining seed diversity is a matter of survival. In this episode, Local Bites interviews ecologist and renowned seed conservationist, Dr. Debal Deb on the value of traditional seeds in an unstable world. Deb argues that traditional seeds are vitally important, not just to ensure food security, but also for protecting local food sovereignty against the corporate control of food systems around the world. Deb shares insights from his work conserving and sharing over 900 indigenous seed varieties in eastern India, and he talks about why ecological farming, a communitarian ethos, and localization are all key components of his conservation efforts. Learn more about Deb’s work here, or watch these short films by Jason Taylor of The Source Project: “The Farmer, the Architect and the Scientist” (made for The Gaia Foundation), and “Food Web Theory“.

In this episode, Local Bites interviews Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance to talk about the multiple social, economic and environmental benefits of local business ownership and community-scaled financial institutions. Mitchell lays out the evidence for why local ownership matters, and provides a thorough debunking of the idea that large, global corporations are more efficient or create more jobs than smaller-scale, community-rooted enterprises. After warning listeners about the growing consolidation of economic power in the hands of fewer and fewer global corporations, Mitchell exposes the policy decisions that have led to such concentrated ownership. She concludes by highlighting several promising initiatives from the growing localization movement, and articulating the key components of a ‘localist policy agenda’.

« September 2017 »